Are examples the only thing which is useful for the advancement of design? Is theory of no use to design because it is concerned with the particular?
To me, this would imply that there is no such things as the design profession, or the field of design; every act of design, then, would be particular and thus distinct from every other act of design; there would be no common denominators. In that case, it would be meaningless to talk of any such thing as design in the first place..
Of course design can be theorised. Of course theory can be useful to design. And therefore there can be design research (science). And case studies may be a design research methodology and lead to theory. But so can other research methodologies.
Examples offer precedents. To guide design by precedents may be useful at times, but also has pitfalls. Remember Schön's example of how to think about the redesign of a paintbrush. You may consider a paintbrush as a handle with a bunch of hair at one end. If so, you may try to improve the paintbrush by looking at past exemplars and aim at improving the hair, their bundling, the handle, etc. Or you may consider the essence of a paintbrush as that of a pump which sucks up paint from the paintbucket and releases it onto the surface to be painted in a more or less controlled manner. This largely expands the potential solutions for redesign. In the former case, the approach relies on case studies of past examples, in the latter it relies on theorisation.
Broadbent has lined up a number of different approaches to design as either iconic, canonic or analogic. By the iconic approach, design works by precedents. Traditional houses look the same because new houses are built in the image of existing houses. By the canonic approach, design is created within a particular paradigm or style; baroque, modernism, minimalism, deconstructivism (he, he, yes it was a style despite the deconstructivists' claim that it wasn't), etc. By the analogic approach, concepts are transferred from one realm to another by analogy.
In this framing, designing a new paintbrush by looking to past exemplars represents an iconic approach, while conceiving a paintbrush as a pump represents an analogic approach.
In itself, Broadbent's different approaches to design is a wonderful and indeed useful theorisation of design. It may have been derived by means of case studies (who knows?) but it is a generally applicable piece of design theory.
After all, there is nothing as practical as a good theory. This is also true in design.
Best,
Nicolai Steinø
http://aalborg.academia.edu/NicolaiSteinø
Den 10/06/2011 kl. 11.22 skrev "Frederick van Amstel" <[log in to unmask]>:
>>
>> And now for an even more biased, acerbic, personal opinion: Too large
>> a proportion of the good writings in design are about the history of
>> design and about how designers think. Personally, neither of these advance
>> the state of the art of design. Let sociologists of science and
>> psychologists study how designers think: why do we call those studies
>> design? They aren't. As for history, yes it is important, but that does not
>> move the theory and practice forward in generalizable, constructive ways.
>>
>
> If Design is not a generalizable practice, why research should be?
>
> History analysis and case studies had been used by designers as one of the
> most usefull sources for learning and inspiration. They highlight the
> complexity of each context and the ethical and aesthetical choices from
> people who needed to act there.
>
> If you give designers a general theory of Design and ask them to apply that
> to their practice, they won't start until you give them an example. That's
> not a limitation from designers, that's the way they work. Most of design
> practice is taught, learnt and disseminated by examples.
>
> As Richard Buchanan put in his Wicked Problems article: "design is
> fundamentally concerned with the particular, and there is no science of the
> particular."
>
>
> --
> .
> .{ Frederick van Amstel }.
> http://fredvanamstel.com
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